Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

thegenesisblock.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 50 posts

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#31

Post by bdcravens »

a-priori wrote: post #27
joosters wrote: post #4

3.5 bitcoin is roughly $450. If you bought one now and started it running in September, you will likely never break-even or make a profit: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a65c154190

Someone with a better understanding of Bitcoins please correct me here if I'm wrong. But if I understand things correctly, mining is one way (the only way?) to get untraceable Bitcoins because they're created out of thin air by the network. By paying your electricity bill to run a miner, you're effectively converting your local currency into Bitcoins. As as long as you credit the mining reward to a wallet that has no…

That's one way of looking at it. Keep in mind that it's not uncommon for electric companies to report huge jumps in electricity usage to the police, as high bills are considered evidence of marijuana growth, and have led to serious busts.

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#32

Post by ssharp »

tlrobinson wrote: post #16
joosters wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you're trying to sell a bitcoin miner, you want at least the chance for the operators to make money. If you can take the specs of the box and calculate that you won't make a profit even if it was running right now , why would you buy it? The company selling them is going to do badly. It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.

"It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up." I'm sure that has happened quite a bit in actual gold rushes. People aren't always rational, and no one really knows exactly how fast the mining difficulty will increase.

I don't know anything about BitCoin mining, but is there a way to get lucky mining BitCoins where you stumble upon some BitCoins using less computing resources than you should have? In other words, is mining a process open to probabilities or is it a process where you churn through a finite and predictable number of calculations before you dig up a coin?

I'd have to think one of the things that would lead someone to buy a shovel is that they could get lucky and dig up some gold. If luck isn't a factor in BitCoin mining, then you're not even giving yourself a chance to overcome a negative expected value situation. It's like better a dollar on BlackJack and instead of dealing cards, they just give you back 99 cents. Nobody would play that game.

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#33

Post by [deleted] »

a-priori wrote: post #27
joosters wrote: post #4

3.5 bitcoin is roughly $450. If you bought one now and started it running in September, you will likely never break-even or make a profit: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a65c154190

Someone with a better understanding of Bitcoins please correct me here if I'm wrong. But if I understand things correctly, mining is one way (the only way?) to get untraceable Bitcoins because they're created out of thin air by the network. By paying your electricity bill to run a miner, you're effectively converting your local currency into Bitcoins. As as long as you credit the mining reward to a wallet that has no…

[deleted]

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#34

Post by speeder »

miahi wrote: post #30
joosters wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you're trying to sell a bitcoin miner, you want at least the chance for the operators to make money. If you can take the specs of the box and calculate that you won't make a profit even if it was running right now , why would you buy it? The company selling them is going to do badly. It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.

It's actually selling the shovel and the mining grounds, you just have to invest the time to use the shovel. A good question is: if the miner is so good, why don't they just use it and profit? This actually happens, as many bitcoin miner sellers only deliver them after a waiting time.

ASICMiner actually started as a company that would make their own ASIC to mine on their own.

What they are doing, is profiting for a market that pay crazy rates on mining machines, by having profits on short term, but I think as soon selling them become less profitable than mining, they will switch back to purely mining.

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#35

Post by tlrobinson »

ssharp wrote: post #32
tlrobinson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up." I'm sure that has happened quite a bit in actual gold rushes. People aren't always rational, and no one really knows exactly how fast the mining difficulty will increase.

I don't know anything about BitCoin mining, but is there a way to get lucky mining BitCoins where you stumble upon some BitCoins using less computing resources than you should have? In other words, is mining a process open to probabilities or is it a process where you churn through a finite and predictable number of calculations before you dig up a coin? I'd have to think one of the things that would lead someone to…

Yes, mining is probabilistic. The more hashing power you have the more quickly you're likely to mine a block, but it could take more or less time depending on luck.

Most miners now participate in pools, which smooths out your returns by working together to mine blocks more regularly, which are then distributed based on the amount of work each miner contributed.

If you "solo mine" it might take, say, 1000 days to mine a block, but if you pool mine with 1000 other miners it might only take 1 day, giving you 1/1000 of a block reward each day (minus pool fees), vs 1 whole block reward every 1000 days (on average).

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#36

Post by wmf »

ssharp wrote: post #32
tlrobinson wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up." I'm sure that has happened quite a bit in actual gold rushes. People aren't always rational, and no one really knows exactly how fast the mining difficulty will increase.

I don't know anything about BitCoin mining, but is there a way to get lucky mining BitCoins where you stumble upon some BitCoins using less computing resources than you should have? In other words, is mining a process open to probabilities or is it a process where you churn through a finite and predictable number of calculations before you dig up a coin? I'd have to think one of the things that would lead someone to…

There is luck involved, but it's pretty small. http://bitcoinchain.com/pools

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#37

Post by smackfu »

dfrey wrote: post #15

Who buys this crap? If I a company builds hardware that can profitably mine bitcoins, it will keep the hardware and do the mining itself rather than selling it into the market.

Generally they are selling pre-orders in order to fund the development and production costs. In theory, they could use investors instead, but maybe they couldn't find one.

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#38

Post by SilasX »

dfrey wrote: post #15

Who buys this crap? If I a company builds hardware that can profitably mine bitcoins, it will keep the hardware and do the mining itself rather than selling it into the market.

Kinda like how nobody sells mining drills because "if using that drill were profitable, they would use it themselves"?

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#39

Post by jessaustin »

a-priori wrote: post #27
joosters wrote: post #4

3.5 bitcoin is roughly $450. If you bought one now and started it running in September, you will likely never break-even or make a profit: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a65c154190

Someone with a better understanding of Bitcoins please correct me here if I'm wrong. But if I understand things correctly, mining is one way (the only way?) to get untraceable Bitcoins because they're created out of thin air by the network. By paying your electricity bill to run a miner, you're effectively converting your local currency into Bitcoins. As as long as you credit the mining reward to a wallet that has no…

It's my impression that obtaining BTC isn't the interesting problem for most would-be launderers. After all, you just have to sell some CC #s or provide custom DDOS services or do whatever nefarious shit you do that makes laundering a good idea, and presto you have BTC. The real problem is trading those fat stacks of BTC for fast cars, palatial mansions, the intimate attentions of beautiful people, etc. without the fuzz connecting those riches back to the nefarious shit that earned them. That is, as for regular money laundering, the trick is make dirty funds clean. It's actually straightforward to obtain dirty funds in the first place, for a criminal.

See here for more on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6291546

Re: ASICMiner Blade Prices Reduced 65% After Shares Crash

#40

Post by jessaustin »

joosters wrote: post #12
tibbon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the point though right? Its an arms race with a nearly perfectly efficient market that will (in the future) not be a get-rich-quick scheme for miners. If there's profit to be made easily, the some people will react by mining more and then it 'fixes' the market. Assume that some people will act irrationally and mine inefficiently, or with the hope that the market will skyrocket- these people will bring…

Not really. If you're trying to sell a bitcoin miner, you want at least the chance for the operators to make money. If you can take the specs of the box and calculate that you won't make a profit even if it was running right now , why would you buy it? The company selling them is going to do badly. It's like trying to sell shovels to gold prospectors, but for more money than the price of the gold that they'll dig up.

...you want at least the chance for the operators to make money.

If one is familiar with the apparatus of neoclassical economic theory, one might expect producers to want to maximize producer surplus at the expense of consumer surplus. That's possible to the extent that demand is fairly inelastic, and there are barriers (could be short-term!) to other producers entering the market.

Post reply on HN